Greek Particles (1990)

Summary

Greek Particles Two facts well-known to linguists for many years are that Ancient Greek orthography represented speech much more closely than does modern English orthography, or practically any other modern European orthography, and that speech, unlike writing, is full of hesitations, false starts, and meaningless expletive utterances which are not recorded in writing. For instance, In English, a typical spoken text might be: Well, it’s the, umm... you know, the one that, uh, you got from the store across the street. We can make a number of interesting observations about the meaningless expletives in the above and in similar texts, of which the interested reader can collect many more examples, if he is so inclined. The comments in this paper are based on a collection of 327 naturally occurring English texts ranging from 3 seconds to 118 seconds in length. The first observation concerns the syntactic positions in which such expletives occur. In brief, expletives occur immediately before major syntactic constituents, or immediately following the first word of a major constituent. Thus, we often find particles inserted at the beginning of an utterance, or after the first word, as in (2) and (3) below; at the beginning of a noun phrase, or after the article, as in (4) and (5); or at other constituent boundaries, as in (6) and (7). Ahh.. no, I don’t think so. John, um, went to Liberia yesterday. Hildegarde swallowed, yeah, an entire disk drive. Did he surrender the...wha...fish? Eric and the man with no nose...uhh...slew the werewolf with a bazooka. There’s a situation with, you know, the ringmaster. Of course, expletives can be inserted at many points during one speech utterance, and may be iterated at any of these points, as seen in (1) above. In fact, sometimes so many expletives are used that the entire communicative function of speech fails. Consider example (8), taken from the Watergate tape transcripts submitted by the Nixon White House to the independent counsel....